It's been 8 months since the first Surface Festival gig and nearly a year since we became aware of and applied for Surface Festival 2011. Last weekend marked the end of this years competition and culminated in us playing the International Showcase at IndigO2 in London.

We never expected to get as far as we did and while we didn't come away with any prizes, the involvement in the latter stages of the competition in particular as well as the benefits of our efforts of self-improvement throughout the process were reward enough.

Surface Festival gave us the opportunity to play some great venues that we hadn't played before, including Asylum, main stage O2 Academy and of course IndigO2 at The O2 in London. The last round was played in one hell of a venue and being on stage with so many other great bands and standing up there watching you dancing around in front of us as we played was a great pleasure.

It's Friday night and The Sharp Darts are on the way to London! We'll be staying over in the capital as we have to be at the venue early for the Surface Festival International Showcase!

Along with 20 other bands making their way towards the prestigious O2 Arena, we're very excited and looking forward to a great gig!

If the atmosphere at the last gig is anything to go by, this gig is going to be awesome! With the best bands from each region playing, the IndigO2 should be heaving!

We'll be keeping you updated on our antics on the way to London and throughout the day on Saturday on our facebook page and twitter feed, so keep an eye on both of those for details of what we're up to and photos etc. We'll do our best to post some video while we're there as well.

The Sharp Darts will be heading down to London to play the Surface Festival International Showcase at IndigO2 on 1st October. In this series we'll be looking at the bands that have made it through from each region.

Apologies to Wales, Scotland, West and Barcelona regions for describing them as "the rest", this is certainly no indication that they are any less good than those featured so far, it just made sense to group them together in the blog post.

The Sharp Darts will be heading down to London to play the Surface Festival International Showcase at IndigO2 on 1st October. In this series we'll be looking at the bands that have made it through from each region.

In this post we'll be looking at our favourite round so far, the midlands! This was a great night at O2 Academy Birmingham where 21 bands rocked the main stage. We had the time of our lives and from watching the other bands, so did they!

Unfortunately due to the time we had to turn up, being a session 2 band, we didn't get to see the Pargeters, who, as fellow indie kids, we were keen to watch. Have a look at the table below to see how we shaped up against the other four bands that made it though:

The Sharp Darts will be heading down to London to play the Surface Festival International Showcase at IndigO2 on 1st October. In this series we'll be looking at the bands that have made it through from each region.

In this post we'll be looking at the bands that played in the North region that will be joining us at the International Showcase on Saturday.

Here's the results table for the bands that made it through. They played over three nights up in Manchester. for a full list of results check out the Surface Festival website.